International Compensation Practices

Using the attatched article, respond to classmates posts.   ONLY USE REFERENCES FROM THIS ARTICLE  ATTATCHED TO SUPPORT YOUR COMMENTS

1. Kelly Smith 

The article this week covers an analysis done on ten different countries in respect to compensation benefits that currently exist or should exist.  Several areas were surveyed and the results of each were quite interesting.

Often times people expect to be paid based on their performance, especially here in the United States. The first area surveyed was regarding the importance of pay incentives within each country.  The majority of countries had extremely low scores in this area, with the exception of PRC, Japan, and Taiwan (Lowe, 2017).  The overall consensus amongst all countries, is the desire for increased pay incentives.

Another area surveyed was whether or not incentives are a significant amount of pay.  Results reveal that employers across the board don’t offer many incentives when it comes to pay.  All countries fell below a 3.0 regarding how things are presently, with Korea being the only country above this with a 3.26 (Lowe, 2017).  The reading also points out that the three countries who claim to pay based on performance, have some of the lowest scores.  These countries are Australia, Canada, and the United States.

The benefits area surveyed resulted in six countries scoring above a 3.0 regarding how benefits currently are within their organizations.  The U.S and Canada had the highest scores of a 3.72 and 3.78 (Lowe, 2017).  The results show that benefits to some degree are important within most organizations.

The results of this survey were consistent throughout and amongst all countries.  The conclusion gathered here is collectively all countries feel their current compensation plans could be improved upon, however not make up most of one’s salary (Lowe, 2017).

A positive aspect of this article is there is an international effort to analyze pay and compensation gaps for expatriates.

A negative is that there is too much time and resources spent on translating the acquired information in the study.  Another negative is there are too many variables to simply quantify and qualify comparable data.  It’s too complicated to study this topic and present it in basic terms.

Reference: Lowe, K. M. (2017). International Compensation Practices: A Ten-Country Comparative Analysis. Retrieved November 20, 2017, from UMUC: https://learn.umuc.edu/content/enforced/293614-027231-01-2178-OL4-7982/International_Compensation.pdf

2. Jared Campbell 

The following information is derived from the article by (De Cieri, Dowling, Lowe, Milliman, 2002).

Pay incentives are important Item #1: Surveys that differentiated between what is and should be by a numerical rating was distributed amongst managers and engineers originating from ten different locations internationally. Included in that survey was a series of questions relating to how important pay incentives are and are perceived. Based on the data derived from the survey, the average was considerably low from current situation perspective. Whereas, the survey results indicated that from a “should be” perspective, the data was rather high for the U.S. and parts of central America. One of the remarks indicated that these results were interesting because of the high work ethic in the U.S.. For the current situation perspective, the U.S. volunteers reported that pay incentives were not important but that they “should be.” In fact, a large majority of the countries listed considered pay incentives to be important, but were currently not in their organizations.

Job Performance is the Basis for Pay Raises Item #9: The results of this survey indicated that job performance should be the basis for pay raises for all countries. The “is now” portion of the survey indicated that all countries did not feel that they were being compensated based on individual performance. This concept may be indicative of the desire for individualism in the culture of each country. Regardless, overall the results indicated that workers generally believe that they should be compensated according to how they perform. Being that this appears to be a universal concept, it should spark the necessity for HR to begin more research on qualitative performance reviews.

Benefits are Considered to be Generous Item #7: This survey portion compared the “is now” and “should be” perspective of the volunteers for benefits being considered generous. Overall, the mean of each of these results indicated that the countries felt that their benefits should be more generous than they are now. This is to be suspected as it correlates with typical human behavior. However, it does indicate that benefits are a factor worth reviewing at any given organization because employees in general believe they should be more generous. Had they been lower means, that would have indicated that the benefits being provided were meeting the expectations of the employees. Which is unlikely.

References:

Lowe, K. M. (2017). International Compensation Practices: A Ten-Country Comparative Analysis. Retrieved November 20, 2017, from UMUC: https://learn.umuc.edu/content/enforced/293614-027231-01-2178-OL4-7982/International_Compensation.pdf